In my wardrobe there are seven unopened packages and letters from my Gran.  There are also two unread letters from my parents.  The content of all this mail, without looking, can easily be summarised as, “Call us so we can nag you some more.”  The proverbial ostrich* has nothing on me.

While my parents haven’t heard from me in a few weeks, you haven’t heard about my Little Monster Reward Chart in months.  In both cases I’ve been burying my head in the sand.

Baines gave me the chart as a Christmas gift and I promptly filled it with a quartet of activities that roughly corresponded to some of the challenges on this blog.

•  Up by 9:30am (aka “4. Wake up at a Reasonable Hour”).
• Eat breakfast before midday (Identical to “11. Eat Breakfast Daily”).
• Apply for a job or work experience (a wage would sort out “2. Get out of Debt” and work experience would cover some of the subsections for “1. Write More”).
• Write at least 500 words (corresponds to the challenge “1. Write More”).

If I got twenty ticks I was allowed to eat steak, this was a reward that allowed me to justify spending money I didn’t have on overpriced cuts of meat and was also an excuse for me and Guy to go to the pub.  The week I got the chart I managed to get seven ticks.  Over the following months I lowered my target to fifteen and yet I still never managed to exceed seven ticks in a week.

Gingell has been well aware of this failure for a long time (she even scrawled “big fat liar” on the chart once when she woke me up before 9:30am and I went back to bed).  Last week she decided to try positive reinforcement.

If I got more than seven ticks I got to sample the delights of PG Tips’ Special Blend Tea.  When pressed to disclose what was so special about it she replied that it was “hand picked by Colombian virgins”.  The box makes no mention of this, therefore it must be true.

To kill any suspense that I may have unintentionally accumulated in the preceding paragraphs, I succeeded with (by my standards) an impressive 12 ticks (if I was allowed to count applying for job agencies on my chart I would have easily hit 15).

So far this week I only have six ticks and, while 12 is not unachievable, I can see the Summer Ball and its aftermath scuppering my plans.

*Proverbial because real ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand, they just run away, really fast.